Gun Powder Trail Pt 3

So almost set up, just a couple more things to do. I landed the copter and took off within a few moments glad to leave behind the mental leech. No telling how much he got but it’s safe to assume he knows the basics at this point, hopefully he has no idea what I need or want him to do. If he found out it might be a problem for me, hold out hope for me James.

The last fellow I need to get in touch with is a bit of a massive recluse so I’m lucky T.H.E.M. had some information on him or else I’d have never found him. Lives on a little island he owns with a few people, from the info I gathered he apparently stole the place right out of the water. He’s a main player in this incident, really, he’s sort of responsible for a lot of what happens this year. A human accelerant to be frank. The other side enlists him early on and has him go on to work for them until they got some kind of hold over him, last time I read the file they found out a major problem in his biology.

Loathe as I am to do it I’m going to do the same, inform him of his condition early and promise him a cure to keep him loyal. If I can catch him early I can hopefully prevent some of the bigger loses, play him against the other side and give the right people more time to work out what’s going on. Lord knows it’s a long shot but the man has credit for doing the impossible, he’s the brother of that one freaky Redd fellow and if he’s half as mad as that fellow we have a diversion at least.

I had assumed this would have been a simple job but something a bit off happened, something a bit worrying. I had to charter a boat to find the guy, only way to his home island is a set of special directions or a teleportation device. Considering I don’t have the latter I’ll simply mesh with navigational systems, upload my consciousness into some kind of satellite web-work and track the island to get at it. So I went to rent out a boat with my lucrative funds.

Nano-Stream let’s me hack accounts to the point that money isn’t too hard to come by. After this purchase I had intended to go to ground but as I said something went very wrong at the rental place. I walk in and this guy keeps looking at me, little twitchy guy, all wiry and stuff. Looks like he’s coming off a something that’s kept him pretty high for a while. He seems to look up and down and all around the place before he gets closer to me, tilting his head this way and that way until he looks me dead in the eye and he says.

“Oh god. This is going to be my problem isn’t it?” Then I turn to talk to him, try to nano stun him with something and all my joints seize up, all the bots stop what they’re doing and I feel like my hearts cracked apart. I can’t breathe, I can’t barely see, my deja-vu sets in like a slap across the face with rebar.

I see what I’m doing in one eye and I see him dancing through some ghost landscape in my mind, grabbing supplies from the boating place, shrieking as he runs out with them. Minute he’s outta the store and the clerk chases after him I can move again, sweet machine augmented relief. I don’t know who or what the guy was but he damn near shorted me out. Damn near caused every fission battery powered microbe in me to just up and kill themselves there and then in the store. Thankfully whatever happened stopped before it could ACTUALLY kill me.

I bought the rental license, still a corporal by the way which is still radical, and ran off to the docks to collect my boat and get going. Last thing I needed was to get hit with whatever that was again, I didn’t want to play with the outside chance it was some kind of time stuff catching up to me. Just slowing me down all at once. Like I said, I have no idea how time travel works with the Verne engine.

Last thing I need to do is phase out of life and existence before I get finished here. That fellow bares watching though, I don’t think he’s here to stop me...but I’ll have to keep my eyes open. Search databases for him until I get an answer for who he is.

---

Okay so next up he sails a bunch more and rants a lot. Guys a total bore to listen to when travelling. So let’s go hang out with the crazy guy who is a good friend of mine. His name’s J.P. Griswold, James Phineas Griswold that is and boy does he break my fucking heart. I have seen and read a great deal of sob stories in my time but J.P. that boy is just a great big mistake of a person. He’s like thirty CHarlie Brown’s hitting into one another for all of time. I mean I can’t even put into words what his deal is, well not yet but he has a number of deals and all of them are pretty bad.

Thankfully he’s got someone looking out for him. His sister Sally Griswold, nice enough bird, but she’s got a mild habit of giving people undue grief. Works for The Lighthouse it’s a charity for super-humans, like with bad powers. SO if you spit acid but always melt your jaw off then you wanna go to the Lighthouse for help and an appeal. Apparently, according to rumour, there’s a doctor there who can cure superhuman powers, can only do it once a month but the guy can remove powers from folk who are so screwed with their powers they can’t live.

Sally gets a call from her brother or more accurately someone calls her regarding her brother. Her brother does a show where he cold-reads an audience and wows people by randomly predicting stuff about them that he would never know how to do, without as he continuously tells the audience cold reading them. His producer is something is a psychopath despite being a college grad making a 3am show about a cold read specialist who often proclaims how phony he is while cold reading.

That said if J.P. didn’t turn up for whatever reason, he had a lot of reasons, Sally was the first person his producer called. Said producer called loud and fast and several times in the space of a minute, to the point that Sally assumed the producer may be superhuman...more than likely one of those younger folk who can do things with a phone that blow minds.

The only place she could think of her brother being was maybe back at home, she insisted on living with him since he had his condition. Which meant she had to call up the boss and request some time off, or at least an extended break, and run home to check on J.P. She had an assistant, recently, but he had turned out to be some kind of two faced asshole named Louis Niccals who robbed them one night. That’s right robbed, as in stole from, a charity!

He was the kind of man whom Sally ought to have disliked solely by the way he did his hair, he slicked it back to the point that it did not look slicked back. When one can have hair that doesn’t look how it ought to look then you know they are not to be trusted, for every part of them is capable of deception But Sally trusted him and Sally even liked him a little bit, his smile was rather dashing she’d catch herself thinking sometimes and then she’d remember he robbed a charity and he’d return to being scum. Until the next instance of weakness at least.

She took her mind off of his smile, a quirky thing that popped up at one side of his mouth- oh how she’d love to knock all his teeth out with a hammer…. she called her boss up on the third floor of their squat little building. Much like Sally herself and indeed all members of The Lighthouse her employer had a little issue with his abilities. His problem was quite severe and it has forced him to remain on the third floor of this building for the last decade. Sealed inside a box of his own creation, the chief never leaves. Or if he does Sally has no idea how he does it, she all but runs the home office regardless so for all she knows the chief has never been upstairs and the big glowing box up there is some awkward practical joke she’s never gotten.

The phone rang three times, it always rang three times for the boss, then she was tickled with the sound of something hissing. Cold and metallic sounds dominated conversations with her employer as her voice and his own were passed through various dampeners and softening mufflers so as not to kill her employer. Her employer, whose name I have not yet written or said because he’s a very private person, has a rather sensitive condition.  

Imagine for a moment, or if you can emulate for a second, you’re pouring sand across your fingers. Can you feel it? That little course tickle as they pass between the ridges of your palm and vortices of your finger tips? It’s a little sensation right, pleasant enough. Now imagine some of that sand got stuck in your shoe or in your glove if you’re the kind of person who likes to wear gloves to the beach, those people being assassins and those allergic to the sun but bothered outside by nosing relatives who prattle on about vitamin D and it’s good uses. You get how annoying that feels right? That niggling sensation that persists every time you move the limb, little flecks of sand rubbing up against sensitive skin. That’s his whole everything. He’s that glove with a fleck of sand in it, only for everything.

You breathe he can feel it, you inhale he can feel it, you skin your knee and he can tell you how many layers of skin are damaged. The man has sealed himself inside an iron lung to keep the world out. The range of these abilities is unknown to all but himself, though according to a likely source it’s the entire city of Transmet. I’d like you to imagine feeling every lovers caress, every whispered confession, every skinned knee, every broken bone, every crooked and wobbly tooth in a child, every lie told, every truth heard, every rumour becoming true and every molecule of air vibrating around you all at once. That’s not even a third of what he feels, that’s a terrible analogy, but it was designed to give you the frankest and simplest idea of how and what he feels. In two words; Not Great.

“Hello Sally,” her employer’s voice sounds rather muffled, it always does he’s likely talking through some kind of machine as the act of vocalising- the tensing of muscles, intake and out take of air, alterations of vocal chords, the twitches of his and your inner ear as he hears it- have been known to render him unconscious on one of his bad days. “Something the matter?” His sentences are always short.

“I’ve got a call about my brother,” she said and where it not for the clank of machinery and the whirring of fine things wrought from sand and gold she’d have heard him give a groan of worry, “I think he might have had an attack. Can I go home quickly and see if he’s alright?”

“Go ahead,” something clanks and she thinks he groans amidst the machinery whirring, “shouldn’t even have to ask. Is Cheryl in?”

“No sir,” Sally says, “she was abducted by space giants last week and we have no idea what happened to her.”

“Darndest luck that one.” her employer said finally before a click told Sally that he needed to hang up or one of his many fail safes to keep him from having a stroke hung up for him. She felt for her employer, trapped up in that little box, but she supposed at the end of the day everyone had their little prisons to warden over. She knew she was about to go visit the one inmate she’d convicted.

She left The Lighthouse, which was a lighthouse in name thankfully and not design, and got a look at the hideous headquarters of The Silent Sentinel. It was once just a paper that an old friend of hers, that was stretching the term, worked at with a few sordid maniacs who ran around the world reporting on the happen stance of daily superhuman life. T.H.E.M. did the same through various comic books but apparently they were inaccurate, made punchier, clothes made lesser, tricky parts over complicated or cut for time- removed the human element apparently.  

Sally had never noticed or to be more accurate cared. She read Solaris, she was the most prominent local hero, and a few others to get a picture of the super-human climate around the world. The Sentinel paper, though she never read it, came recommended from her brother who liked the articles and preferred them over the comics because “The paper doesn’t cry about being a liar all the time.”

Sally was reminded of a toad when she looked up at the giant building across the street, not because the building looked like a toad or that it retained toad like qualities not at all. IT was simply Sally found toads and this building disgusting. It might be because the building housed a certain someone she’d hoped to have left behind forever ago or it might have been for a less likely and petty reason. Probably not.

Sally made her way home, she lived close by the business district of Transmet which was a bustling upper class sort of area. Lots of brick buildings reaching up the sky and a dozen or so nouveau glass buildings reaching up to those buildings knees in height. The roads were clogged with vehicles galore, things that couldn’t be called vehicles, scuttling insects filled with smaller insects and variations of the words “creature of choice” and Mobile. TransMet City was once another city, the name forgotten by most, until the year 2000 when something happened.

The Millennial Conflict or War it varies depending on who you ask because nobody can remember it the same way. Something, everyone can agree that it wasn’t someone, launched an attack on our reality. As in all of it, all at once. A single fight that started in the oceans of pre-life and roared on until the sun swallowed all of life in however many billions of years that was. A being bigger than our world, so huge it cast a shadow over time and reality, blotting out all the stars in space and crowing every inch of existence to brush elbows with humanity. The fight lasted forever, it’s still going according to some who can see the scars across time, until we hit the thing across the fucking head with weaponized time. We aged the thing, made it older than everything else, we tethered it to our world. Harpooned the thing with magic, science, madness, strength and every single other thing we could find.

WE impaled the ultimate enemy using our dimension as a base and then we aged the thing to death. It was on our playing field and we killed it with our rules. Shame it’s still out there….oh, sorry. Caught up in war memories, this is Sally’s story not mine. Sorry, forget my head was attached sometimes.

Anyway the thing wounded the dimension Hyper-Reality was tethered too in a few places, scorching away the prime layer of inter-universal bleed that hid H-R from the mundane folk of the world. T.H.E.M. showed up that day in force, they were prepared for this, they put up the quantum dampeners, vibrated all of Hyper-Reality so that it was just misaligned with reality at large. Hiding just behind it, just out of sight, always reachable to those who were unlucky, the uncommon, the unwanted or those who just googled for buying a jet pack some nights. It’s not hard to get here, leaving’s impossible sad to say.

T.H.E.M. changed the name to Transmet city and started enforcing the rules and paperwork, shit was tedious, but it organised everyone together to prevent another CRISIS event like that from happening. We’re all on the same side now when that happens, none of us want the world to end. Not even the muwahahaha I will end the world types.

But yeah Transmet is the only H-R saturated space they have to permanently errect a quantum field around to keep hidden, they can shoot out those fields all over the world to minimise damage to the actual dimension HR is tethered too, don’t want the landlords freaking out- despite the fact they can erase their minds- and finding supers hiding in the kitchen cupboards.

AS such in Transmet it’s normal to find people walking around in full costume all day, car stores that special in animal themed vehicles, money off anti-chafe elastic wear yadda yadda. Super-Hero Central basically. Sally had moved here with her brother years back, after the millennial incident, hoping to find sympathy in the community. They were well received and well liked despite her brothers incidents and constant assurances that he did not have powers.

Her brother assured everyone they knew that he was, in his own words, “pretty fucking insane.” As such nobody really said anything when the Griswold door was coated in duct tape much in the same way doors are not often coated in duct tape. Sally was perturbed to find the door coated entirely in duct tape, down to the handle. She reached out slowly only to find the door open for her, giving her a view of her apartment.

Now she was quite shocked to find her brother half way across the living room, spools of duct tape hanging off his arm, wrapping the rest of her little world in duct tape. She slowly walked in and as she was about cross the threshold into her home her brother turned to look at her, his brown hair glued to his forehead by sweat.

“SHOES OFF!” He howled loudly pointing at her oldie sandals. “Can’t tear this, it’s going to fix everything.”  He slurred before going back to mummifying the coffee table, chatting to himself- she hoped- as he worked. Sally took her shoes off and slid inside the apartment, not liking the cling to the bottoms of her soles as she walked in.

“James,” she said gently, ”James are you okay?” Her brother turned to look at her, one eye twitching in it’s socket in a very not okay way.

“I wasn’t but I’m fine now,” he stopped looked at the ground, “we’re fine now.” He corrected himself. Sally walked over to her brother’s side, the ground twanging and making strange sounds with every step. The walls were covered in tape, most of the floor, the entirety of the kitchen and the ceiling. Dear god how did he get the ceiling?

“Did something happen?”

“ Man’s blood told me the whole world’s going to fall apart soon,” J.P. said airily as if it made total sense, “but duct tape told me it can hold us all together, says so on the box that it fixes everything. SO I’m wrapping everything up to keep it safe.” He nods, this makes sense to him. It does, it does, it does.

“James,” she says slowly, leaning next to him, “you’re having an episode. James you need to stop.” She feels him tense up as he touches her, he locks up as though caught in a trap or a pair of headlights. He says nothing, his jaw just clenched and he shakes his head a dozen or more times in rapid succession.

“Let me finish,” he says,” please. Let me finish. We can tear it all down but I n-” he stops his eyes go wide and he looks at the tape rolls on his arms. “I FUCKING KNOW WE NEED TAPE TO FIX IT! BUT it’s strange and wrong and, you’re not helping me here! Shut up I don’t need YOUR opinion on this lamp!” He starts screaming at the apartment again and Sally can’t bear to watch. She goes to her room, free of tape as he’d never invade her privacy even at his worst.

She sits on her bed and feels an icicle forming behind her eye, vision goes blurry, her head hurts and all she wants to do is cry. Cry for what she turned her brother into.

---

Away from there a man finds an island that doesn’t exist and he finds an orange man, as in he’s as orange as an orange dressed orange in autumn, waiting for him on the dock with the kind of smile someone who knows the script backwards and forwards wears. The man on the boat throws him a mooring line and the thing on the dock that looks like a man but I assure you he isn’t a man, I also assure you he isn’t an orange either he’s something very complicated.

“Very good sir,” the orange man states as he catches the rope, “it’s quite hard for most people to find master Niccals little island hovel. You must be very talented or have cheated quite severely, either way I welcome you to what was Navrika but is now known as Isla-Louis. I am Abba, like the band, that is not my name but you need to call me something so call me that.” He ties off the line as he speaks, quickly anchoring it around a thin strip of steel on the makeshift dock. Tying it off with something that would look perfectly pleasant atop a christmas present. “Who might I tell the master is calling?” He inquires as he helps the man with the black nails off the boat.

“You won’t, he doesn’t need to know who I am. I am simply a client,” the man replies and Abba looks at him for a moment, his expression perfectly plain. He smiles a moment later, his eyes narrowing slightly as the sun beats down on his bald head.

“Mr. Blank then,” Abba replies, “right this way Mr.Blank.” Abba said and traipsed towards the house. Blank followed him. Troubled by the fact that the name Blank fit now, rather like a brand. The man called Abba had told him he was called Blank and that fit in his head just right, like he’d cleared away a cobweb and found the word floating around in the empty space of Blank’s skull and dubbed him that. And it was so.

“I must warn you Mr. Blank,” Abba said as he lead Blank past a number of discarded gold bars strewn about the lawn, “the master is in a bit of a foul mood recently. He’s secreted himself away in a dark and musty room and has scarcely poked his head about the door in these past four days. You might find him rather,” Abba held open the door to the large mansion complex on the island, “ripe.”

Blank just nodded as his eyes roamed over the plunder scattered around, abandoned and abused like a good book in a readers hands. There were weapons, lots of those, old and new. Some looked like they’d been made yesterday, automatic rifles with fine filigree across the handles, others older than Blank could guess, swords too big to hold and things made out of the bones of creatures that ought not to have existed here. They lay discarded about on the lawn like children’s toys, mingling with gold bars and full sized Easter Island heads that had toppled over to expose thing wiring circuits.

There was a pool or at least the shapings of one. It had been filled in with jewels and coinage of a thousand denominations. Fat, thin coins of civilizations long lost, the meagre tine coins of today, and rotten black pennies from Cromwell’s backyard. The inside of the mansion complex, which itself I would like to remind you all was stolen as was the island it was on, was more elaborate and strewn with items. To describe it all would take an age and the man hardly needs help bragging. He is after all The Second Best Thief In Existence.

“Over here Mr. Blank,” Abba said guiding the man’s eyes away from a painting that looked rather like a starry night, save the sky was filled with stranger shapes and he swore the whirls of space and darkness twisted and writhed like serpents. Blank and Abba came to a door and a woman. The woman was average height, average build and toting the kind of gun that reminds you not to cause trouble unless you want to lose the privilege of having kneecaps inside your body.

“Who’s this?” She asked, leaning against the wall in her armoured vest.

“Mr. Blank,” Abba said momentarily, “he wishes to speak with Master Niccals about a commission.” Abba claimed perfectly content. Blank was looking at the woman’s scars, fresh and red and ruinous looking. Three great ragged lines going across her face, over her blue eyes, and maring her dark skin. He thought, rather strangely, they suited her. He wasn’t sure why, they just felt right where they were.

“Alright,” she said, “in you go. I hear him shriek or wail or anything else like that I come in and make you eat the wooden parts of this gun,” she narrowed her cool blue eyes on him, “we understand one another.”

“Yes.” Blank said as she pulled open the door and he took a step inside. The door closed behind him a moment later. There was no light in this room save a thin strip that bled between the curtains to one side, a single solitary light no thicker than his finger, slumped across the ground.

“Mr. Blank,” came a voice from somewhere ahead of him, “funny name. Is it German?”

“It’s not real,” Blank said, “I have a proposal for you Mr. Niccals.” Blank said as he tried to pinpoint exactly where the voice was coming from. He took a step towards the curtains and made to grab them.

“Don’t. I’m not wearing my face right now, I can hardly let you see me without my face on,” the other voice said, there was a faint green glow in the distance, “leave the light out of this. Start talking man what do you want?”

“What does anyone want with a thief?”

“In my experience it’s either revenge or to trick them into doing something for them.”

“Well I need you to steal something for me at a certain time in the near future,” Blank began, “I hear you don’t accept conventional payment.”

“I live in a mansion on a secret magical island, at this point money and finance holds very little sway over me.” Niccals replied a moment later. “Usually I decide if it poses a challenge to me, if it does I will do it. If not I recommend you someone else and maybe steal it anyway, but I keep it for myself instead of giving it to you.” He sighed, “I’m mercurial like that.”

There was a sound of movement as Louis pulled himself up and moved through the total pitch darkness with sound sure steps, “So come offer me something amazing.”

“You’ve recently been having troubles haven’t you?” The green eye in the darkness paused. “You’ve been stealing things without knowing how, little things, big things, you can’t stop can you? There’s a little voice in your head that’s saying something isn’t there?” The eye narrowed on him. “I want you to steal something and you need my help.”

“You can fix it?” There’s an edge to Louis voice as he asks. “Make it stop? Because I’m fighting a losing battle right now, it...it WANTS. That’s all it is, pure, living avarice.” He steps forward and pulls back the curtain to let Blank see him for the first time.

He’s a lot like his brother, Blank thinks, his proportions are slightly strange...exaggerated almost. Nothing too obvious to stick out in public...but his fingers seem too delicate, his arms a bit too long, his hips and legs...slightly feminine. There’s something very off about how he looks but you’d never know unless you looked. His hair is a thick slicked back blonde mess that folds into sideburns and something that might be a mullet but might be something more tasteful, like a dead bird nailed to his skull and painted yellow.

He has one green eye that makes you think of emeralds, everybody thinks of emeralds when they see it...well emerald now. As his other eyes is covered by a stark white bandage, or more accurately the bandage covers a hole where there used to be an eye. His brother took the other emerald simply because he could.

“I can help you Mr. Niccals,” Blank claims, “but you must help me first. Do we have an agreement.” Blank held out one of his hands. Aware that by simply speaking he’d already won Louis Niccals over with his three magic words, it would help to have his loyalty regardless. Louis looked at the man’s hand, his lips quirked up at one end in a horrible little sneer.

“Sure you’re holding all the cards, have an advantage or two over me, can find my magical hidden island and won’t tell me who you are,” Louis took his hand, “I’ll help you. But let me tell you something. There was someone else who thought he could take advantage of me. I fucking destroyed his entire world and I would have no trouble destroying yours.”

Oh Mr. Niccals, Blank thought, if only you knew. If only you knew.
---

“This is T.H.E.M. Liaison William Batson how can I help you?”

“Radio- PAPA has been killed. You've not noticed for three months.”

William Batson worked for T.H.E.M. He had just had his whole day ruined by the news of a dead operative. He groaned with the understanding that things were about to get very very complicated for him.